


When The Bough Breaks

by bluesquints



Category: Iron Fist (TV), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Romance, Brother-Sister Relationships, F/M, Gun Violence, Major Character Injury, One Shot, POV Third Person, Season/Series 01, Sibling Incest, Unplanned Pregnancy, all ships - canon or otherwise/popular or not - need at least one baby fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 15:02:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15866019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesquints/pseuds/bluesquints
Summary: The cradle will fall, as will the tattered remnants of a broken family.





	When The Bough Breaks

When Joy refuses her favourite drink during a celebratory night out, Ward doesn’t think anything of it. Just Joy being health conscious and showing him up as the more responsible Meachum, as per usual. He doesn’t blink when she turns her nose up at an odour no one else could quite smell and he shrugs when she finches at Toro jumping up on her excitedly once they get home in the wee hours of the morning.

It’s only when he’s woken later by sounds of her wretching in the en suite that he puts two and two together.

“Why haven’t you told me?”

Joy is brushing her teeth when she shrugs, glancing back at him in the mirror. “There’s no point when I know what you’ll say.”

“What’s that?”

“Get rid of it.” She drops her toothbrush down into its holder far harder than the damn thing deserved. Whilst he had disregarded other telltale signs, her drastic shift in mood was something he had noticed, chiefly because he was frequently on the receiving end of it - something that now made all the sense in the world. The back of his head still ached from the blow dryer she’d propelled in his general direction the previous night.

Ward sighs, rubbing at said tender spot. “Joy, you can’t seriously be considering anything else.” But of course she was. “You know you couldn’t go through with adoption,” because he knows his sister and he knows her heart. She’d take one look at that baby and fall in love.

She turns to look at him with those eyes that could bring even the highest of men to their knees. The eyes he just knows their child will inherit and make him forget to breathe. And to be true, he wouldn’t be able to sign those papers either.

“Who said abortion is any easier?” She leans back against the sink, her arms folded under her breasts. It’s her stance of relaxed defiance; an indication that tells Ward she won’t give in so easily. It makes him wonder just how long she’d known about this development; how recent and just how much she’d thought about it, considered the possibilities, weighed their options and, somewhere along the way, gotten herself attached.

If only he’d paid more attention to the subtle ways in which she was changing. Perhaps then he might’ve been able to dissuade her from committing herself ta a future that couldn’t be.

“Joy, please,” he implores, hating himself for asking her to do this.

She has unfolded her arms now and is standing before him, her hands on his chest, her eyes pleading with hope and it takes all his strength not to touch her. “No one needs to know it’s yours. No one but us.” It could work and he can tell she has pondered it at length - his sister was nothing if not fastidious. If only she’d apply her strategic impassiveness to this too. Irregardless, Ward knows something Joy doesn’t and for any of their efforts to hide the child’s true paternity, their own father would know.

And he’d much rather live to see Harold die again. Finally and for good this time.

“What about when the kid is old enough to wonder? Are you gonna tell him that Uncle Ward is his Daddy?” He doesn’t tell her he wants to be known as ‘Daddy’ from the start because he is surprised by it himself. Not to mention that’s just not realistic and if she wasn’t going to be, it was his responsibility to shoulder that burden.

“We’ll cross that bridge when w-“

“The bridge was burned the moment we decided to fuck each other,” he interrupts, frustrated. It sounds harsh but it was true. It was futile to avoid eventualities and this, he realises, was one of them. They hadn’t exactly been careful.

“We are not doing this. We can’t.” She had to accept that. End of discussion

The look on her face however, said otherwise. “This is not your decision, Ward.”

Joy slams the door in his face and he’s left with a sore nose to accompany the headache.

...

Two weeks pass with no further mention of the elephant in the room and it served no effort to defuse the tension surrounding it. Contrarily, it only seems to grow with the gradual swell of Joy’s belly.

No one has commented thus far but Ward knows people are starting to suspect. It was difficult not to notice when she insisted on wearing her regular form fitting clothing at the office. Although he was among those who made no remarks, he thinks she does it to draw his attention to the small but conspicuous change in her body - the body he knows better than his own - to urge some paternal need or longing in him.

He wishes he could say it wasn’t working.

A couple days after their initial argument at the threshold of her en suite, she’d left a folder on his desk pertaining to Rand’s upcoming overseas branch in China. Tucked gently into the folds between two pages was the grainy, obscured, black and white square that would begin to destabilise any and all grievances he had on the subject.

He stares at it longer than he ought to before securing it in the desk drawer to his right, among small orange bottles he throws out that very same evening by a sudden compulsion to do better; to be better.

Much like with said sonograph, Ward would find his gaze drifting toward Joy’s middle whenever his guard slipped in the days to follows. He hates himself for forcing her to go it alone for the past few weeks and decides one morning of many that, like everything else, that enough was enough - they were in it together.

He calls for her through the shared door of their adjoined offices to let her know what he’d decided when some blond vagrant stumbles in.

Turns out it’s a long since forgotten Danny Rand whose sudden resurrection starts with a legal battle over shareholdings and ends with Joy getting shot.

She’s in shock and he’s pressing his jacket to the bloodied wound, telling her she’s gonna be okay and he’ll get them both through it.

“Please,” he implores Bakuto to let him get her to a hospital. “She’s pregnant.”

Bakuto seems genuinely remorseful in his apology but he still doesn’t let them go. For all his efforts to stop the bleeding, the towels grow stained and heavy against his hands as Joy gradually weakens in his arms.

“Ward,” she barely manages, “the baby...”

“I know, Joy. You’re gonna be okay, just trust me.”

He hears their father’s confusion behind him, “baby? What baby?” but he ignores it. Joy needs him.

As soon as Bakuto has left with Danny, Ward shoves his father out of the way and gathers Joy up in his arms. He’d have carried her into the hospital if Harold hadn’t got to her first. He hates to see his hands on her.

As he fills in her details on the medical registration form, his hand shakes when he checks the box marked ‘pregnant’. Thankfully, Harold is too busy dehumanising other patients in the waiting room to notice.

“Meachum?” The doctor announces hours later.

Harold is out of his seat quickly but Ward is faster. “How is she?”

“She’ll recover.” He feels the relief start to overwhelm him but he couldn’t quite breathe just yet: “And the baby?”

“Are you the father?”

He can feel Harold’s eyes on him and he settles for “i’m her brother” instead.

He hears the words “I’m very sorry,” and his heart plummets in his chest.

The doctor tells them in which room they could find her but he doesn’t hear it. His world had stopped spinning.

He feels a firm hand on his shoulder, lurching him back to reality. “Don’t worry, son. I’ll break the news to her...”

Ward shrugs his father off, seething. “You will not. You will stay the hell away from her.” To Harold’s credit, he does. Though Ward knows it’s more likely due to the fact he cares more about his reemergence into the world than his own daughter.

The next day, when Ward returns to her side after showering and changing out of his bloodied clothes, he hopes she’ll have finally woken up but he dreads having to face her all the same. He knows she’ll be broken by this just as he knows she’ll blame him for having caused it.

She tells him she doesn’t want to see him and asks him to leave. She’d never before looked at him with such pure distrust and indifference. It feels far worse than anything their father had inflicted upon him in the last thirteen years.

“I wanted that baby too, Joy.” But of course she doesn’t believe him - he never had the chance to tell her.

Later that night, he watches her leave Rand, crying in the back of a car when they lock eyes across the street.

He wants to get back in his car and follow her, make his penance and, if she should let him, hold her so that they might grieve together. Perhaps then she might not have disappeared.


End file.
